In addition to big-screen public movie theaters, popular personal video display devices now range from mobile phones to personal computers to huge home television sets. Video first shown on a big screen to a silent crowd gathered in a darkened theater might come to be viewed on a small, mobile-phone screen by a single person … Continue reading entertainment that scales well
Good government must respond effectively to administrative problems. In China, claims of wrongful government action are addressed through petitions to complaint offices (the Xinfang system) and through court cases (administrative litigation). From 1996 to 2004, Xinfang petitions were perhaps forty times as numerous as court cases.[1] How these two processes shape communication with persons not … Continue reading communication about administrative problems
Shared interests and new communications capabilities together seems to have reshaped cities and civilizations in ancient China and Mesopotamia (Tell Brak). … Read the post constituting political authority in ancient China & Mesopotamia
The development of writing gave humans technology for storing knowledge and conveying it across time. But, at least in China, storing and transmitting knowledge doesn’t seem to be a good explanation for the earliest writing. The earliest corpus of Chinese writing is oracle-bone inscriptions from the Late Shang Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty arose about 3500 … Continue reading oracle-bone inscriptions: ancient Chinese lifelogging